Swarming

The Birds and the Bees and Agile

The Catalysts

� Tom Perry

� Dhaval Panchal

� You

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Tom Perry

Swarming Publishing Creativity Scrum

Complexity coaching Mentoring SailingBeer Teamwork Design Sci-Fi Agile XP

My Interests:

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Email: tperry@authorize.net

Beer Teamwork Design Sci-Fi Agile XP

humorLeadership passionSoftware

Dhaval Panchal

� Agile Coach, Analyst, and Certified Scrum Practitioner with SolutionsIQ

� Trained and coached 30+ Scrum project teams during enterprise rollouts, including midsized to Fortune 10 companies

Background in development,

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� Background in development, business and functional analysis, organizational change, project management, and business intelligence

Email: DRPanchal@SolutionsIQ.com

Agenda

� Introduction to Swarming

� Applying Swarming to Development

� Critical Factors for Swarming

� Conclusions

� Q&A� Q&A

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Introduction to Swarming

� What is Swarming?

� Origins of Swarming

� Characteristics of Swarming

� Swarming and Self Organization

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What is Swarming?

� “The collective behavior that emerges from a group of social

insects.”� Bonabeau – Swarm Intelligence, p.109

� It’s what bugs do…

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� Swarming behavior = Self Organizing behavior

Origins of Swarming

Natural Origins:

� Slime Molds

� Ants

� Bees

� People

Multidisciplinary Origins:

� Mathematics (complexity, chaos)

� Biology (animal behavior)

� Psychology (behavior, neurology)

� Economics (Market behavior)

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Example: Swarming In Action

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*Recorded from “CoolSchool.exe”

Characteristics of Swarming

� Flexibility (adapt to changing environment)

� Robustness (even when individuals fail, the group can

still perform tasks)

� Self-Organization (no central control)

Eric Bonabeau & Christopher Meyer

“Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think about Business”

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Self Organization

“Self-organization refers to exactly what is suggested:

systems that appear to organize themselves without

external direction, manipulation, or control.”

Tom De Wolf and Tom Holvoet,

“Emergence Versus Self-organization: Different Concepts but Promising When

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“Emergence Versus Self-organization: Different Concepts but Promising When

Combined”

Swarming Exercise

� Francis Galton’s Ox

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Applying Swarming to Development Teams

� Is swarming Agile?

� Conditions for Swarming

� How agilists got it – a critique

� Tools for Swarming

� Conventional Notions of Swarming

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� Conventional Notions of Swarming

Is Swarming Agile?

From the Principles of the Agile Manifesto:

� “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”

� “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.”

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its behavior accordingly.”

� “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”

� “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

Conditions for Swarming

� Employees maintain their ability to explore new

opportunities while exploiting existing ones;

� Enable a person with an idea to recruit others;

� Allow, but not force, people to be recruited, even

when they are working in a core business;

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when they are working in a core business;

� Let the system self-select the best ideas; and

� Support the winning ideas with sufficient resources

Eric Bonabeau & Christopher Meyer

“Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think about Business”

Examples of Swarming Teams

� Alcoholics Anonymous

� Open Source

� Google

� Open Spaces

� The Apache

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� The Apache

� Wikipedia

The 4 Principles of Open Space

1.Whoever comes is the right

people.

2. Whenever it starts is the right

time.

3.Whatever happens is the only

thing that could have.

4.When it’s over, it’s over.

How Agilists Got it Right

� Lightweight, simple rules

� Encouraging high bandwidth communication

� Face to face communication

� Building in support for emergence

� Fostering the ability to change frequently

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Fostering the ability to change frequently

� Fostering the interchange of new ideas

� Create a place to keep and prioritize new ideas – the

backlog

� Decentralized, self-organizing teams

� Now I get it!

How Agilists Got it Wrong

� Too constrained by the product owner

� Prevents teams from working on what they are interested in

� No substantive guidance regarding building self-organizing teams

� You’re agile now! Go self-organize! Now what?

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� You’re agile now! Go self-organize! Now what?

� Focus on business needs at the expense of innovation

� Scrum attempts to constrain the innovation to only that of interest to the PO. Be creative, but only inside this box…

Team Swarming Exercise

� Dynamic Triangle Exercise

You A: Friend B: Enemy

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You A: Friend B: Enemy

B: EnemyA: Friend

You

Tools for Swarming: The Working Agreement

� Shared team values

� List of rules the team agrees

to work by

� Supports negative feedback

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Tools for Swarming: The Retrospective

� An opportunity to review and revise the working

agreement

� A chance to put new rules in place

� A means of filtering out the rules that are “Losers”

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Conventional Notions of Swarming are Wrong

� Swarming is a fire drill

� Swarming means an absence of rules or processes

� Swarming is an exception to normal activity

� Swarming is equally useful in all environments

� Swarming means everybody works on the same thing at � Swarming means everybody works on the same thing at

once

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Critical Factors for Swarming

� The Four Bases of Self Organization

� Fundamental Swarming Rules

� Critical Factors for swarm Intelligence

� Three Kinds of Problems

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The four bases of self-organization

� positive feedback (amplification)

� negative feedback (for counter-balance and

stabilization)

� amplification of fluctuations (randomness, errors,

random walks)

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� multiple Interactions

Thiemo Krink, Swarm Intelligence - Introduction

Fundamental Swarming Rules

� Employees maintain their ability to explore new

opportunities while exploiting existing ones;

� Enable a person with an idea to recruit others;

� Allow, but not force, people to be recruited, even

when they are working in a core business;

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when they are working in a core business;

� Let the system self-select the best ideas; and

� Support the winning ideas with sufficient resources

Eric Bonabeau & Christopher Meyer

“Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think about Business”

Critical Factors for Swarm Intelligence*

� Diversity

� Independence

� Decentralization

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*James Suroweicki, The Wisdom of Crowds

Swarm Intelligence

There are three kinds of problems that Swarm

Intelligence addresses:

� Cognition (logical problems that can be solved)

� Coordination (require members of a group to coordinate

their behavior)

� Cooperation (getting self-interested, distrustful, people

to work together)

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James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds

Sharing Values Exercise

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Conclusions

� Self-Organizing Teams are Driven…

� Winners and Losers…

� Swarming at Authorize.net

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Self Organizing Teams are Driven…

� Self-organizing teams depend on a participants ability

to discover an attractive subject that they are

passionate about. Something they are so passionate

about that they want to share it with others.

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Winners and Losers…

“…what makes a system successful is its ability to

generate lots of losers and then to recognize them as

such and kill them off.”

-James Surowiecki, 2004, p. 29

Winners and Losers…

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Swarming at Authorize.net

The Innovation Bazaar

1. Advertise ideas on a regular schedule

2. Actively recruit team members

a) Seek membership outside developmenta) Seek membership outside development

3. Celebrate Success

4. Use a rating System for Ideas

5. Monthly “Summit of the Bazaar”

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Exercise: Make up your own rules

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Resources

� The Wisdom of Crowds – James Suroweicki� Emergence – Steven Johnson� Micromotives and Macro Behavior – Thomas Schelling

� The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations – OriPower of Leaderless Organizations – OriBrafman and Rod Beckstrom

� Swarm Creativity – Peter Gloor� Swarm Intelligence: A Whole New Way to Think about Business – Eric Bonabeau and Christopher Meyer

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Online Resourceshttp://www.bioteams.com/

http://www.systems-thinking.org/

http://www.calresco.org/themes.htm#pap

http://www.cenizal.com/?p=14

http://grant.robinson.name/projects/cellularAutomata/

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0707/feature5/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm

http://www.jimhighsmith.com/pubs.html

http://www.mgtaylor.com/mgtaylor/jotm/spring97/flock.htm

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http://www.openspaceworld.org/

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/FLAOH/cbnhtml/slides.html

http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

http://courses.washington.edu/gis203/index.html

http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Swarm_Effect

http://www.swarmcreativity.net/

http://www.ickn.org/

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/COMSELLI.html

http://www.sce.carleton.ca/netmanage/tony/swarm.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/science/13traff.html

Q&A

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